This article from NYTimes.com, published in last Sunday's New York Times
Magazine section
Post-9/11 Modernism
Questions for Eric Fischl
October 27, 2002
Interview by DAVID RAKOFF
Q Your sculpture commemorating Sept. 11, ''Tumbling
Woman,'' was recently removed from Rockefeller Center. Is
that the largest controversy you've been through? Certainly
the Arthur Ashe statue at Flushing Meadows freaked out some
people.
I guess it would be the highest profile. With the Ashe
statue, the criticism seemed to come from very
literal-minded people who would say things like, ''We've
never seen a nude tennis player'' or ''Where's the tennis
racket?'' I think I'm most hurt by this one.
Q But isn't a certain amount of controversy what an artist
hopes for?
I just feel like it would be cynical of me to appreciate
the controversy, because it wasn't controversy I was
looking for.
Q You're not a provocateur in that way?
No. I actually have done paintings in the past, back in the
early 80's, that came out of profound anger and confusion.
The sensational aspect was intentional. But that was a long
time ago by a young artist.
Q Where did that guy go?
He went into an adult world more complicated and subtle and
more fascinating, and whatever. I wasn't trying to make a
universal monument to sum up the entire experience of 9/11.
The kind of response that I was wanting to get was one in
which people would allow me to share in the experience, the
holding up, the sitting with -- so of course the response
of ''Get this out of here, you can't feel this'' or ''You
can't make us feel this way'' was incredibly hurtful.
Q Maybe the problem is that some have interpreted this body
twisting in freefall as a piece of grim, plastic
photojournalism.
One might see a moment of impact in a kind of way that
implies brains splattering, a graphic moment there. The
thing is that if you look at the piece itself, it feels
like a dream in which somebody is floating. There's no
weight there that is sending this crushing, rippling
current back through the body as it hits a solid mass. It
feels more like a tumbleweed, even though it's a massive
sculpture. So somebody else looking at it might say, ''God,
it reminds me of falling in a dream right before I wake
up.'' Both of those are probably correct.
Q Has your art now turned to other current events?
No. It's
actually gone back to sort of smaller, more confined
spaces. I've been working on the relationship between men
and women, intimacy, privacy, boundaries, all of those
issues.
Q Given the outcry, would you have done things differently?
I wouldn't have made the sculpture differently at all. I
even regret caving in to Rockefeller Center so fast and
saying:
''Yeah, take it away. I don't want to hurt anybody.'' I'm
sorry I didn't raise a stink over it. I hate this idea that
there are some people who have a right to express their
suffering and others who don't, that there are those in
this hierarchy of pain who own it more than you do. It's
not about necessarily witnessing firsthand that makes the
experience. Picasso wasn't at Guernica when it happened;
Goya wasn't there on the firing line. This is what a
culture looks to art for, to put image, or voice, or
context to a way of rethinking, reseeing, re-experiencing.
Q When ''Guernica'' was first exhibited, I don't think
people felt Picasso wasn't entitled to paint it.
Yeah, I think this is a new turn, for the worse. Right now
we're shrinking away from truth. No one can criticize the
president because we're in a very vulnerable time, even
though he's doing some things that are terrifying. You
can't express your personal horror and trauma at something
that we all experienced. I think what happened is that
since the 60's there's been an ambition that art merge
itself with pop culture. At first it was an ironic stance,
and then it became actually a real thing; people wanted to
have art as a playground and as entertainment. And that's
fine in good times, but when something terrible or powerful
or meaningful happens, you want an art that speaks to that,
that embraces the language that would carry us forward,
bring us together, all of that stuff. I think that 9/11
showed us that as an art world we weren't quite qualified
to deal with this. Not trained enough to handle it.
Q That's some fairly grim training we're facing, then.
It's
a terrible way to have to be trained, it's true, but the
way the art world has been training younger and younger
artists is in ideological gamesmanship, and there's been a
lack of training in history and in techniques that one
could apply in rendering the human form, for example. A lot
of the young kids are sort of fabulous at drawing cartoons.
But a cartoon's going to be pretty hard to express a lot of
the experience of the last year. People have told me I
should stop talking about this, just let it die down. But I
can't stand idly by.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/magazine/27QUESTIONS.html?ex=1036746186&ei=1&en=0c5bf0de842de730
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